1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a content providing and obtaining system, and is applicable, for example, to a data providing system for providing data on various distribution information such as various content data and the advertisement, of music, motion pictures, etc. (hereinafter, this is referred to as distribution data) to a customer by means of the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, the Internet being a computer communication network that it had been used in many institutes or the like for research and study in the world scale, has been quickly popularized also among companies and customers as a computer communication tool, by a use in business such as sale for merchandise, distribution of content data, and advertisement of a company and merchandise.
By using the Internet in business, the customer can buy desired merchandise and can obtain desired content data by a personal computer for instance, while staying at home. At the same time, the customer can obtain various distribution data such as the advertisement of a company and merchandise by the personal computer.
In the distribution of content data on the Internet, the transmission efficiency of the content data can be improved by transmitting compressively-coded content data to a customer's personal computer.
In the customer's personal computer, thus obtained compressively-coded content data is decoded, and the customer can view a content based on the content data.
However, in recent years, plural kinds of methods have been introduced into the market as methods of compressively coding content data. A compression coding method to be used is different depending on the manufacturing company of the content data or the like.
On the other hand, in the customer's personal computer, normally, a decoding software corresponding to a specified compression coding method is installed, or a decoding circuit only corresponding to the above specified compression coding method is provided to restrain increasing the circuit scale or the like.
Therefore, in the customer's personal computer, if the decoding software and the decoding circuit do not cope with the compression coding method that was used in the compression coding of the obtained content data, the content data cannot be decoded until the customer newly obtain a decoding software and a decoding circuit cope with that. There has been a problem that the customer cannot easily view the content.